AMONG THE notable international visitors jetting in for Cúirt is Elif Batuman, author of the hugely enjoyable The Possessed; Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.
The book charts Batuman’s abiding love of Russian literature and her often hilarious adventures amid the world of academia or on her travels as a student to regions of the former Soviet Union.
Batuman combines a scholarly intellect full of lively observations with a sharply comic sensibility. She is equally engrossing as she reveals surprising links between the writer Isaac Babel and King Kong or vividly describes ghastly toilet facilities in Uzbekistan.
Batuman was born in New York in 1977 to a Turkish-American family. She graduated from Harvard and completed her doctorate in comparative literature at Stanford University. Her work has been widely published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, London Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is currently writer in residence at Koc University in Istanbul.
Over an afternoon phone call from her Turkish apartment, Batuman talks about her work. A few days before our conversation, she had been announced as the winner of the inaugural €5,000 Terry Southern Prize for Humour for ‘My Twelve-hour Blind Date With Dostoevsky’, her five-part account of a marathon theatrical performance of Dostoevsky’s The Demons which appeared in The Paris Review.
In congratulating her on the review I ask whether she minds being seen as a comic writer. “It was very exciting to get the prize,” she declares, “and it doesn’t bother me being seen as a comic writer. In fact I think I prefer that over being viewed as an academic.”
While Batuman has visited Turkey before, her current stint at Koc University is the first time she has lived in the country for an extended period. How is she finding the experience?
“I’m really enjoying it,” she asserts. “I’m thinking of staying beyond the year of my contract. I think Turkey is in an interesting position now as a country, it’s more forward looking and open than Russia is. It’s quite a dynamic place.
“I’m also getting more into Turkish literature now. Before it didn’t appeal to me so much because it didn’t seem to me to have the same level of drama that you find in Russian literature but I am getting to know it better now I am here.”
Having first fallen in love with Russian literature when she read Anna Karenina and then studied it at university, did she find her study visits to the former USSR affirming her initial passion for the subject?
“Oh yes, I think it did,” she states. “It was my first experience of going to a different country to study so that was all very new and fascinating; it felt like being in some big video game at times! The people were generally very welcoming as well, though it could be difficult at times because they tend to have a certain scepticism about anyone who isn’t a native Russian speaker.”
Perhaps the most arresting essay title in her book is ‘Who Killed Tolstoy?’ which combines a memorable, often very funny, account of an academic conference at Tolstoy’s estate with Batuman’s playful and teasingly plausible speculations that his death may have been due to poisoning.
Did she advance this theory purely in a spirit of fun or does she think there could be a grain of truth in it?
“I don’t think he was poisoned,” she chuckles. “For one thing, if he had been some scholar would definitely have unearthed the evidence long before now. Mind you, both my parents are doctors and my father said to me that the speculations I make concerning the possible causes of poison were medically plausible.
“I remember soon after the essay was published I got a phone call from a journalist in Argentina asking me to speak on behalf of the recent theory emerging from America that Tolstoy had been poisoned. I had to tell him that I was the only person who had put the theory forward!”
Elif Batuman will read (along with Geoff Dyer ) at Druid on Friday April 15 at 3.30pm. Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
